edweird

I think a large part of the reason for a male majority in gaming is that developers have very actively pushed in that direction. I suppose in the early days of gaming there would likely have been more male interest in developing games, because culturally, males were more commonly interested in electronics and engineering. So as gaming developed, it was primarily male developers leading the way, making the games that they wanted to play, trying to make the "coolest" thing possible, pushing boundaries and having the biggest impact on gaming (ie ID's games, wolfenstein and quake). With the success of those games came explosions of interest in gaming... but primarily from males, due to the content of the games. When those explosions occured, all sorts of people were realising the money making potential of the industry, and as the majority of the existing audience was male, developers deliberately and repeatedly targeted that male audience, and still do to this day. No doubt their focus on that male audience, and obsessions with guns, blood, cars, girls, etc, that have saturated the market, is what turns a great many females off gaming. It's not that girls don't have as much potential to be interested in (or good at) games as guys do, it's simply that developers\publishers have focused so intensely on the male audience that they have, in general, actively worked against having a large female fanbase. Obviously I'm speaking very very generally here. My sister and I used to play various console platformers as kids, and we later got into king's quest and monkey island and so on, but interestingly her interest in games waned when 3D became the next big thing, and games started obsessing over their technology and graphics more than their creativity or fun. Early 3D gaming also tended towards shooting and blowing stuff up, probably because, as I mentioned, the biggest leaps forward in 3D gaming happened to come from those male-oriented games. Recently though, my sister thoroughly appreciated CMI, what she saw of ICO, and she nearly died of happiness when she saw a video of Loco Roco. See, there's no great secret to making games that appeal to girls. It's just that since there are so many uncreative developers out there to make money, they keep retreading the same themes, over and over again. There are just so many successful male-oriented games to copy. Creative developers such as Will Wright, who have original ideas and aren't making quake clones or racing clones or whatever other clones, have shown gaming's capacity to attract female attention quite successfully. Unfortunately, the corporate nature of the gaming industry suffers the same problem as the corporate film and music industries - publishers are too afraid to deviate from already successful formulas... hence the constant re-treading of the same material. And hence my gradual loss of interest in gaming. As a hardcore gamer, and someone who has worked in the industry (and hopes to do a lot more of that), that's pretty sad. Gaming's potential as an artistic medium sets my imagination on fire, yet lately it just seems like hard work to find a game that raises my interest. But that's another rant for another time I guess

Trespasser was the sort of gem whose rough edges were a part of it's immersive charm. I loved it. In retrospect, the Microprose game 'Mantis' was a bit crappy, but being rather young and having never seen a game like it when I happened across a free copy (my dad was given damaged stock from work), it utterly facinated me, enough for me to somehow work my way through it. I had a fondness for 'Zeliard' too, I played a hell of a lot of that. I suppose I wouldn't consider it a work of greatness now though, I don't know.

Pressing F11 takes a screenshot and puts a .bmp in your game directory.

Don't get me wrong, Heart of Darkness is a great game! I just find the premise\setting\main-character-designs and even music to be in a direction that is less to my tastes. All the elements support each other well, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with them, but they're very cliche, obviously in an attempt to make the game more accessible (which annoys me even more because other aspects of the game clearly demonstrate the creative artistry behind it). If a film were to be made with the same or similar characters and setting, for example, I wouldn't be interested in seeing it. It's interesting to compare the two games in that sense. Another World gives you a rich setting but a completely wordless protagonist (much like Half-Life). This gives you the oportunity to impose your own feelings on the game, to really put yourself into the character's shoes. Heart of Darkness, on the other hand, tells all - you're constantly told what your character is thinking or feeling in cutscenes for instance, reminding you that it's someone else's story, and not yours, and it's a story that I can't really settle into. In Another World, your motivation is pure survival, which anyone can relate to. In Heart of Darkness, you're a kid determined to travel to an alternate universe, to fight through the deadly hoards and get your unimaginatively named dog back. I just can't emotionally invest in the character, or the quest. It might have interested me when I was a lot younger. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the game enough to stick it through to the end, but the elements I didn't like about it constantly distracted me from the elements I did like. It still gets my thumbs up though, it clearly has genuine artistry behind it.

Yeap, that was me. A series of strange occurences later I've been without the internet for a long while (just rectified this week), and free time is a pipedream. I do hope to get back to it (I was having a lot of fun with the tracks I was working on, even started multitracking some live violin with nice results), but in future I'm certainly not going to go on about what I'm going to do until I've basically already done it Lesson learned. It seems the audio restoration is on hold too due to missing tapes or something? It's a shame I guess, but it does mean that the possibility of having both the music and audio restored to release at the same time is still there. I'll be sure to post more music on the scummvm forums if I get a chance to work on it.

It's flaws are more obvious now, and knowing the game pretty well takes away much of that sense of discovery and the unknown (part of what made the game immersive to me the first time was not knowing where I was going to end up or how much of the game or world I had left to see, or even if I was necessarily going the right way or doing the right things), but I still love it. I just wish Chachi would do another game with this kind of tone and atmosphere. Heart of Darkness was entertaining, but the cartooniness, characters and plot bothered me a bit. It was a much more polished game, but a less mature one. I think that's partly what made this game stand out so much in it's time - it was quite a mature game in a genre populated by countless immature, over the top or cartoony games.